


Independently Burning

by jouissant



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Christmas, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-25 13:28:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17122250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Dick and Nix get in and out of their own way.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slightlytookish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlytookish/gifts).



> There were 48(!) fics with the title I originally wanted to use so I got this one from the copy on a box of vintage Christmas lights. BUT IT WORKS!

_September 1945 - France_

“There you are,” Nix said, swinging around the doorframe without bothering to knock. “I was beginning to think you’d skipped out on me.” 

Dick rubbed a hand over his face. It was 1830, and it was nearly dark outside already. Another year dying, he’d thought on the walk over to Regimental HQ, watching the yellowing leaves on the skinny trees that still studded the town’s main street. He was finally beginning to believe there was a chance he’d see the States again before ’45 was out. And good riddance, although it wasn’t usually in Dick’s nature to wish time away. 

At the door Nix looked agitated, as though he meant to start harassing Dick about working late at any moment. He had a cigarette between his lips, both hands shoved in his pockets. He was tracing a line across the floor with the toe of one boot. He had an excuse, Dick supposed. For his odds of beating the waning year across the Atlantic were better than Dick’s by a long shot: he was shipping out first thing in the morning. The troopship sailed at noon. Dick had been trying unsuccessfully to forget it, but now that Nix was here he decided might as well abandon the effort entirely. He set his pen down and sat back in his chair. 

“Where would I go?” he asked. “If I was going to skip out on you, I mean.” 

“Oh, I don’t know. I hear there’s a hell of a bill at the USO in Paris, for example. Couldn’t blame you.” 

“That sounds more your speed. I know how you feel about dancing.” 

“Mmm. I do love to cut a rug. But unfortunately, I’ve got other plans.”

Nix came closer and perched on the edge of Dick’s desk. He moved a stack of paperwork over to make room, glancing down at it with distaste. He nudged Dick’s foot with his own. “C’mon, don’t tell me you forgot my last night.” 

Dick sighed. “I was just trying to get ahead on some of these requisition forms. You know, so I don’t lose too much ground when I’m crying into my coffee tomorrow.” 

Nix raised an eyebrow. He looked like he was going to preen, the way he often did when Dick allowed himself to flirt. That was a dangerous look, Dick thought with chagrin. It made him want to keep doing it. 

“And every day after that,” Nix said, inspecting his fingernails. “But seriously, Dick. Don’t say you’re going to make me spend my last night in the ETO all by my lonesome.” 

“Didn’t you hear? There’s no more O to speak of. There’s just a whole heck of a lot of forms to fill out.” Dick lifted his current stack a couple of inches above the desk and let it drop onto the surface with a demonstrative thwack. 

“Well, they’ve got their very best man on the job,” Nix said. “Can’t think of a better time to bow out, honestly.” He laid a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “Now come on. You might not be drinking, but I’m sure as hell not going to let you get away without buying me one. For old time’s sake, if nothing else.”

“If nothing else,” Dick echoed. He groaned and stretched, throwing Nix’s hand off of him. He wasn’t much for any of Nix’s typical pastimes, but that had never stopped him before. In any case, it beat the alternative, which was sitting at his desk and stewing.

Dick hated Joigny. He guessed he’d feel the same way about any place here at the tail end of the war, sick to death as he was of the army and its endless, pointless vicissitudes. Rumor had it the place had once been a German work camp, and when the occupation force had cleared them out they’d taken over the place without a moment’s thought for potential improvements. The oversight, to Dick, seemed indecent. There had been no latrines to speak of, and what might once have been a campground had been churned into a square mile of boot-sucking mud. They’d spent the first month just making the place livable; even now it was barely so, and it seemed to Dick that the dregs of the 506th had stooped to the level of the camp’s squalid predecessors. 

He spent most of his time haranguing them for fraternizing and trying to throw some sort of system of order at the stream of men and materiel flowing past him to the coast, much of which was only transiently his responsibility in the first place. Nix could see the futility of it, and passed his days cruising from one entertainment to the next—a few days’ leave, a night out, a card game—with perhaps a smattering of work in between. But Dick had always been bad at blowing off steam, and so he went around in a cold sort of rage he could never quite shake. He went running for an hour every morning, a long slog through the muck, just to try and stay ahead of it. It didn’t work. The other day he’d found himself fantasizing about being goaded into a fistfight, and Nix hadn’t even left yet. 

Now he let himself be led out of the office and ushered into a jeep, which chewed and rattled its way through the camp to a makeshift bar in town, run by a committee of enterprising locals who’d managed to squirrel away enough wine and liquor to stock it. What they hadn’t magicked out of their basements and walls they’d traded for on the black market, which was how Dick ended up sitting around a table with Nix, Harry, and Ron Speirs, having spent two weeks’ pay on a half full bottle of Vat 69 that, for all they knew, had belonged to Nix in the first place.

“What do you think the odds are,” Nix asked, squinting at Dick across the table, “that this bottle crossed the Atlantic ensconced in your footlocker?” 

Harry snorted. “Ensconced, he says. What’ll we do without him, boys? I can feel myself getting dumber already.” 

“I’m serious,” Nix said. “Goes off to war nestled in between pairs of Dick Winters’s socks and underwear and ends up right back where it started. It’s poetic.” 

Dick flushed. He was not particularly enthusiastic about his underwear as a topic of conversation. 

Harry rolled his eyes. “It’s a beautiful thing, Lew,” he said. 

“Sarcasm? From a romantic such as yourself? Frankly, Harry, it’s a disappointment.” 

Ron got up from the table abruptly, having up until now shown no sign that he was listening to the conversation at all. Maybe Nix and Harry had gotten to him. Ron was the kind of drinker who never quite let on how much he’d had, and by now Dick knew he was sometimes frustrated when other men couldn’t follow his example. 

Ron clapped a hand on Nix’s shoulder. “I’m off,” he said. “I’ll see you around, huh, Nixon?” 

“Aw, you’re going? Don’t go,” Harry said, but Nix didn’t look surprised. If anything, when Nix rose to offer Ron a hand Dick thought he saw a look of relief cross his face. Ron shook Nix’s hand and Nix told him to look him up sometime, and just like that Ron was gone in the direction of the exit.

“Guess he’s not much for goodbyes,” Harry said, and raised his glass to Ron’s retreating back. 

Nix and Harry finished the whiskey and moved on to wine, and the evening devolved from there until Dick found himself worried about how exactly they were going to convince Harry that it was a good idea to get up and get to bed. He envied Ron’s ability to simply excuse himself, though Dick knew himself well enough to understand that if he did the same he’d only wind up tossing and turning over everything that could go wrong, every individual scrape Harry was likely to get into before morning in his inebriated state. Nix at least was upright, though swaying slightly, looking down at Harry with a blend of fondness and exasperation. 

“You know, for a drinker he’s got a terrible sense of his limits,” Nix said. 

“Maybe he just doesn’t care.” 

Nix looked at him. “I can’t believe you haven’t figured him out by now. He cares too goddamn much. That’s the problem.” 

Eventually they levered Harry up and out of the bar, and the damp cool of the air seemed to revive him enough to shuffle along between them, mumbling nonsense about Ron and footlockers and sending Kitty a wire. Nix laughed, his arm slung under Harry’s arm, petting Harry on the side, his hand brushing Dick’s chest, a casualty of their proximity. Dick prickled all over with irritation, which was instantly tempered with regret: however much he disliked drinking, Harry was his friend. And however much he was irked to spend Nix’s last hours here babysitting him, perhaps Nix was right about how much Harry cared, and perhaps the two were not unrelated. 

They laid him on his cot like two parents with a baby, the strange tenderness of the moment bringing Dick up short, causing him to let go of Harry before he was quite situated on the mattress. He fell the rest of the way with a quiet huff of breath, and didn’t wake but grumbled in his sleep and turned on to his side. Nix laughed softly, patted him on the cheek. Then he straightened and turned to Dick. 

“So,” Nix said. “Guess we ought to head home ourselves.” 

They’d been sharing a tent not far from Harry’s, with room for a couple of cots and their footlockers and a writing desk Nix had scavenged from somewhere. The tent was more spacious and dryer by far than some of the other places they’d racked but after high summer in Austria Dick had found himself spoiled. For flooring they’d lain boards over top of the mud, so that the ground sometimes tilted slightly underfoot as though they were at sea. Nix had strewn his belongings across his half of the tent, and cursed to see them again now. 

“I was going to ask if you’d packed,” Dick said. 

“Ha. I gave most of it away already,” Nix said. “Shipped some of it home with the booze from Berchtesgaden, though who knows if I’ll ever see any of that again.” 

“I’ll cross my fingers for you.” 

“No you won’t.” Nix sighed and sat on Dick’s bed, which was tightly made and clear of detritus. “Christ, Dick, is it really all over?” 

“All but the shouting. Or maybe whining’s more accurate.” 

“I feel like whining at the thought of that troop ship.” 

“You’re a captain now. Might net you a little more privacy.” 

“Privacy isn’t the point. It’s still a floating tin can that stinks of unwashed men and fish. And—and you won’t be there.” 

Nix had been looking down at his hands, but now he looked up at Dick. He’d managed a haircut on leave in England but he hadn’t bothered to start shaving with any regularity. It was embarrassing how closely Dick had come to associate Nix with a five o’clock shadow. For the rest of his life he’d look twice at a dark, unshaven man. 

No, Dick wouldn’t be there. He’d be here, manouvering Harry around various conflicts and waiting to be allowed to leave, the lines around the 506th drawn and redrawn until the division might as well not exist at all. Shocking, maybe, to hear Nix say it so baldly. But they’d been together so long, chosen to fall in together so often and so deliberately. With Nix gone there would be a real and quantifiable lack. Dick could feel it already, had begun to feel it the day Nix had been cleared to ship back to the States. It ached like a slow-healing wound.

Nix looked crestfallen, almost tearful. Dick gave a disbelieving laugh. Of nerves, maybe, for Nix’s expression suggested feelings that skated far too close to Dick’s own. But Dick had a practical demon inside him that presented itself at all such moments with Nix, and it reminded him now that surely if Nix meant the words that way he’d know the folly of showing it so plainly on his face. After all, Dick had coached himself into similar nonchalance for years. 

“I’m coming to work for you,” Dick said. “Unless there’s something you want to tell me.” 

“No, no. That’s the plan. Wrote my father about it just the other day, as a matter of fact.” 

“So what’s the trouble?” 

“It won’t be the same,” Nix cried. He pounded a closed fist against the cot, petulant as a child. “You know it won’t. Goddammit! I’ve been thinking for days of how to say it to you. It’s just that this”—he gestured wildly between them— “Serving together. I wouldn’t have come through without you.” 

He stood. Dick had stepped close to the bed and when Nix got to his feet they were nearly eye to eye. 

“That’s not true,” Dick sputtered. “Lew, that isn’t true.”

He felt a sudden clawing desperation, the urge to back up, to get more space between them. But he’d been neatly boxed between Nix and the tent’s rear wall, and had nowhere to go unless he moved Nix bodily aside. It couldn’t be true. The words Nix was saying sounded far too much like need. Nix couldn’t need him. It was impossible. The demon on his shoulder paced and twitched. 

“Lew,” Dick said. But the word was too soft, barely a whisper. It refuted nothing. 

“I was going to salute,” Nix went on. “But that just seems stupid now.” 

Instead he put his hands on Dick’s chest, left them there for a moment, fingers plucking at the buttons of Dick’s shirt. Dick closed his own hands on top of them as though to prise them off, but he found he couldn’t, and so they stood there entangled with each other for what was probably ten seconds at most but seemed eternal, seemed to Dick like an exquisite torture that would never end. Until it did, because Nix tilted his head and kissed him. 

It was a cliche, wasn’t it, that time stopped. But if their impasse of a moment ago had seemed to last and last, the kiss threw off the yoke of time entirely. Lew’s lips were warm and supple beneath Dick’s, yielded to his tongue the way he’d always imagined. Lew made a low, wanting sound, and put a hand on Dick’s face. Somewhere distant he could hear a faint shrieking, as of an alarm. He supposed it was the part of him that was sensible, that understood he could never have this, but surely here in the forever of the kiss the demon could be subdued. 

Please, Dick thought. Just let me—

But even as the thought formed in his mind he felt some traitorous sliver of reality sliding home with a sting. He twitched, and the movement seemed to bring Nix back to himself. He backed away, straightened up and stared at Dick with eyes bright and cheeks flushed. Another long moment passed between them, in which Dick felt torn between kissing Nix again and turning and running from the tent. His lips burned, and he had to stop himself from running his fingertips over them. 

Nix coughed. “I’m really drunk.” 

“No you’re not.” 

“Yes,” said Nix slowly. “I am.” 

Dick had waited too long. If he’d kissed Nix again, if he’d managed to keep him from thinking too much—but no, that was almost as bad as plying him to get what he wanted, and if Dick ever thought he’d done that, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. His palms were wet with sweat, and he wiped them on his trousers. The gesture seemed to give Nix further space to move away, to busy himself with the deconstructed contents of his footlocker. 

“It’s awfully crowded in here,” Dick said reflexively. “I, uh, ought to give you some room.”

He didn’t mean for Nix to take him up on it; at least, he didn’t think he did. He said the words, probably, for lack of anything else to say. But here Nix was doing exactly that. Shuffling from foot to foot like he was wearing boots that pinched. Looking uncomfortable. Taking Dick up on it. 

“If you wouldn’t mind.” 

It was the middle of the night. It was ridiculous that Dick should leave. When he thought of all the nights he’d sat up wondering where Nix might be—but he’d offered, and it would be even worse now to take it back. 

“All right then.” And then again, stalling. “All right.” 

“Okay,” Nix said. 

“Guess this is goodbye.” 

Nix had his back half turned to Dick, leaning over the cot after a wad of clothing. He sounded distracted. “Aw, not really. You’ll be back in, what, a couple of months at the most? And you’ll send me a wire as soon as you’re ready.” 

He looked over his shoulder at Dick, as though the tent, Joigny, Europe, Dick himself—as though all this was already an afterthought. As though Nix, in imagining it would never be the same between them, had through some backwards logic decided to make it so. 

This was the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy he specialized in, and Dick knew with a sick certainty that were he to try and argue the point Nix would somehow make him believe none of it had ever happened, and that would be untenable. If he was going to do what Nix suggested, if he was going to be ready, he’d have to knuckle through. 

Dick was a weak man. It must have been true an hour ago, the way an illness is true before its diagnosis, but he had only now realized it. He’d make it home. He’d make himself ready. But he’d do it with the memory of the kiss inside of him, worrying his softest parts. The grit that makes the pearl. 


	2. Chapter 2

_December 1946—New Jersey_

The snow had started up at lunchtime, and Dick had watched it grow heavier through the afternoon. When he punched the clock at last and left the plant it was to step out into a different world, one that was blue and white and silent. The flurries had levelled off but he could smell more snow on the way, that clean ozone tang. There were no cars on the street, nobody on the sidewalk, which leant itself to the fantasy that Dick was the last person left on earth tonight. He used to love winter evenings, but now he hurried home, wanting only to be inside again, to remind himself he had somewhere warm to go.

Last winter in Lancaster he’d been shocked at his own reluctance to go outside once the snow started falling. When he turned down the street and caught sight of Nix’s house he saw that all the lights were blazing, and he smiled in spite of himself. It seemed he wasn’t the only one who wanted a reminder.

After the way they’d left things in France Dick had half expected to return stateside to find Nix’s job offer rescinded, but when he got home to Lancaster there was a stack of mail waiting for him, and at the top of it a manila envelope containing a very official looking contract. But that was almost worse, as though Nix had had nothing to do with it. He’d held on to the contract without a reply until February, when he’d gotten a fretful telephone call: Nix, clearly bolstered by drink, asking him when the hell he was planning on getting himself to New Jersey, because he was about to lose his mind.

Dick didn’t think he could ever remember being so happy as the night Nix called. He’d stood in the front hallway holding the telephone, winding the cord around his fingers and listening to Nix berate him, wearing a smile that split his face, not even bothering to mask it when Ann came downstairs and watched him like he was an interesting zoo exhibit.

“Was that a girl?” she asked, incredulous.

Dick had choked, feigned a coughing fit and set the phone back in its cradle. “Army buddy,” he said, and ducked past her up the stairs.

He’d moved and started work at the beginning of March. Hard to believe it was coming on a year. He liked his job, and living with Nix in his stolid red brick Colonial had gone all right so far. If Nix thought about his last night in Joigny, he didn’t let on, and by now Dick found he could go whole weeks barely thinking of it at all.

Dick let himself inside to find Nix in the sitting room with the radio on. Seeing Dick he leapt up at once, expression a mix of nerves and excitement. Dick saw why right away; behind Nix was a fir tree, wedged conspicuously between the sofa and the window. Nix always seemed to be discomfited by making changes to the house, as though he kept forgetting it belonged to him. Dick knew it was partly out of deference, and he knew that Nix meant well by it. But it needled him all the same, and in a certain mood it irritated Dick outright, made him think he ought to think seriously about finding a place of his own.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“What’s it look like? Had it delivered. I didn’t think you’d be up for stomping around in the woods with an axe. Just a hunch.” Nix shrugged. “It’s December the twentieth. I decided to stop pretending Christmas wasn’t coming.”

Dick nodded. He understood the impulse. He would have been happy to let the holiday slide by himself, but now that Nix had made the effort he felt compelled to appreciate it. “It’s nice,” he said. “You got trimmings?”

“Up in the attic. I was going to go and dig them out after dinner. I ran out of steam after I got the thing assembled.”

The tree was tall for the room, the top of it bent double against the ceiling. Dick tried to imagine Nix wrestling the tree through the front door and laughed in spite of himself. “Now I suppose I can’t say anything about you leaving the office early.”

Nix grinned and poured himself a drink. “Merry Christmas to you too.”

The housekeeper had left a casserole in the refrigerator and they warmed it up in the oven. They didn’t eat together every night; sometimes Nix went into the city and had dinner with his father, or Dick stayed late in the office and ate a leftover sandwich from the canteen. But some nights were like this, across from each other at the kitchen table, sometimes talking, sometimes sitting in companionable silence. At first Dick had driven himself crazy trying to figure out whether or not Nix spared a thought for how it might look, but he’d given up eventually. For Nix acted just the same as he always had. Given that, Dick wasn’t going to be the one to screw it all up.

After they ate Nix had another drink to fortify him for the trip up to the attic, where he insisted on pawing through boxes and handing them down to Dick, leaning so far as he did so that Dick was afraid he’d tumble out of the ceiling altogether and break his neck.

“There’s more of this than I thought,” Nix said, sounding perplexed. They dragged the boxes into the living room, sat on the floor and opened them one by one. They were labeled in a hand Nix didn’t recognize, and he said a little gruffly that it must have been the movers. There were wads of tinsel, strands of shrunken cranberries and popcorn Nix handled like snakes, holding them far from his body.

“Look at these up close,” he said. “You think mice got them? You think we ought to keep them?”

Dick squinted at the popcorn. He didn’t know what to make of being consulted on Christmas decorations. Who was he to say what Nix should keep? By next year he might have a wife again, someone who would have her own ideas.

“Can’t tell.”

“We’ll put them down as a maybe.”

Two full boxes were carefully packed with ornaments nestled like infants in yellowed tissue paper. They were glass, large and luminous, and Nix looked on as Dick peeled the tissue back and held each one up to be admired.

“German glass,” Nix said. “Hand-blown, I’ll bet. Should’ve tossed ‘em like a good patriot, huh?”

“It would have been a waste.”

Dick held a peacock-blue orb up to the light. There was a miniature village painted on it, houses and a church with its steeple and a yellow crescent moon overhead. The night was starred with snowflakes, wrought stroke by stroke, and Dick found himself thinking of the painter, if they’d had someplace in mind as they worked, some hometown in particular. Did it still exist, he wondered, or had it been pounded to gravel? He’d seen so many places like this, watched their inhabitants wander through them in an awful daze as they picked through what was left. He dropped the ornament back into its box more roughly than he meant to. Nix looked up, nudged Dick’s knee with a curious foot.

“Oh, nothing. Just thinking too much.”

“A terrible affliction.” Nix heaved himself up from the floor with a groan and a heavy hand on the couch. He was holding a snarl of lights, which he passed from hand to hand like a football.

“Come on,” he said. “I bet these are half burned out. What time do you think Woolworth’s closes?”

They came back from the store with more lights than Dick thought could fit on the tree, and certainly more than were strictly necessary. More tinsel, and those new bubblers that were supposed to look like candles, and another box of blown glass ornaments that weren’t as fine as the older German ones. But when they were finished trimming it the tree looked lovely. Nix turned the lights out and they stood and looked at it together, and in the glow of the tree Nix’s face looked as young as it had at Fort Benning back at the beginning of everything, and Dick hung the painted ornament high up close to the ceiling and didn’t think about the little town very much at all.

***

On December 23rd Nix asked Dick if he wasn’t planning to go home, which was when Dick realized he wasn’t.

He’d told his parents at Thanksgiving that he wasn’t certain he’d be able to get away again, and he realized now that he’d been hedging, unsure what he would want to do. There was something about the thought of driving home that seemed impossible, or perhaps it was the thought of what came after, long hours in which he would try to distract himself from feeling like a very square peg. The last time he was back in Lancaster he found himself homesick for Aldbourne. He had been so shocked to place the feeling, immediately guilt-stricken that his heart should call so to a place he’d been for, what, a few months? And in wartime, no less. He ought to want to be anywhere but there, yet he’d sat on his bed and wished so fervently to be back in his old billet, or in the little sitting room stoking the fire in the hearth, or sitting quietly with a cup of tea and his Bible.

Nix didn’t hide his pleasure at the suggestion Dick would stay for Christmas, and Dick tried not to feel bad about how happy the response made him in turn. The Barnes’s cottage wasn’t the only thing he missed about the war.

“My sister’s having a party tomorrow night,” Nix said. “She’ll kill me if she finds out you were here and I didn’t bring you, so you’ve got to come along.”

“Aren’t most people with their families?”

“She says it’s for all the mismatched china. People who haven’t got a better place to go. You’re supposed to be single, but you can bring a date if you want.” He pausd here and raised his eyebrows at Dick.

“Oh,” Dick said, understanding. “No. I don’t want to bring a date.”

Blanche Nixon’s apartment in Manhattan was very fashionable, which meant Dick didn’t quite understand the decor. Nix took his coat with authority and tossed it into the bedroom, and then fetched Dick a glass of egg nog. “There. Sip that and look festive.” And then he was gone, cutting through the living room to find his sister and kiss her on the cheek.

Blanche’s friends were as eclectic as her furniture. Men and women of all ages all crowded the little apartment looking varying shades of shy or boisterous, probably depending on how much egg nog they’d had to drink. Blanche was the sort of hostess who took a particular joy in seating her guests next to strangers at dinner parties. She sidled up to Dick and took him by the elbow and handed him back his drink, which he’d tried to lose on top of a bookshelf.

“You can’t hide in a corner all night,” she said. “Now who shall I give you to? And it won’t be Lewis, so don’t even ask.” She tapped a manicured finger against her bottom lip. Across the room Nix appeared deep in conversation with a blonde in a turquoise dress.

Having made her choice, Blanche deposited him beside a man and woman who seemed glad of the arrival of a third party. “This is Richard Winters,” she said. “Lew’s houseguest.”

“Houseguest?” echoed the woman, whose name was Helen something.

“We work together,” said Dick automatically. “He’s letting me use a room. While I find a place,” he added, because Helen was looking at him with a shrewd expression he didn’t like. There was nothing for Dick to hide, and yet he felt she could see straight through him, could see how there was a small dark part of him that wished otherwise.

The man was named Roger. He was slender, with sandy hair and a tidiness about him Dick found attractive. He had long hands with perfect fingernails, pink and oval like little candies, and Dick watched them as Roger spoke, waving his hands around in the air before him. He seemed to be very excited about Dick’s state of affairs. He was in real estate, he said, and here was his card, and wouldn’t Dick give him a call?

Dick found himself drawn into a conversation about the relative merits of this or that township, and whether or not it made financial sense to buy. Dick had no intention of buying a home, had only vaguely entertained the thought of moving out of Nix’s house, but he couldn’t get out of Roger’s sway, kept watching his mouth as he talked. “I’d probably rent a room to start,” he heard himself say. “When? Oh, probably in the new year sometime. I don’t know how long I’m going to be in the area.”

“Give me a ballpark,” said Roger. “One year, two? Longer than that you really ought to think about buying.”

“Probably not longer than two,” Dick said.

He meant it as a demurral. He wanted to tell Roger to forget it, that he really wasn’t planning on moving any time soon, but he could already see the wheels turning in his head, the plans he was making. Dick always thought a salesman of any stripe had a hard time of it, and he felt badly for Roger now, unable to so much as make conversation at a Christmas party without an ear to the ground. Which was why Dick was entertaining him, and why, when he glanced to the side at one point and saw that Nix had been standing there listening, he was powerless to refute anything he’d just said.

They looked at one another. Dick could no longer hear Roger, though he was vaguely aware he was still talking. Nix looked away, then left the room entirely, going back into the kitchen to fetch another drink. Dick watched him pour it through the doorway. When he finished he came back into the living room.

“Lew,” Dick tried, but Nix strode past him and went over to the sofa to sit at the feet of the turquoise blonde, who exclaimed and put her hand on top of his head as though Nix was a pet dog.

It was nearly midnight when they left the party, a full two hours after Dick was usually in bed. He’d spent most of the night hiding in the kitchen picking at a bowl of candied peanuts. He was fairly sure Roger the realtor was a homosexual, which begged the question whether that was why Blanche had felt the need to introduce them, if she somehow knew more about Dick than she let on. Dick was too fatigued to panic about it now, and he had the beginnings of a headache lancing at his temples. He yawned as he got behind the wheel of Nix’s car. Nix was stonily silent, and neither volunteered to drive nor offered any commentary on Dick’s navigating abilities. This departure from the norm made Dick feel as though he had a boulder sitting in his stomach, one that stayed there as he made his way cautiously back along the highway, which had begun to glimmer with ice.

He tried several times to strike up a conversation, even going so far as to bring up the topic of the blonde, but Nix wouldn’t take the bait, only grunted and slouched deeper into the passenger seat. Dick shrugged and turned up the radio, and sang along to Bing Crosby under his breath. After a few minutes he heard Nix begin to sing along too, which somehow only made the boulder sink further.

When Dick pulled into the drive Nix scarcely waited for the car to stop before leaping out of it, and when Dick followed him inside he made a show of banging about, flinging his coat onto the rack with enough force to set it rocking to and fro. Dick steadied the coatrack and hung Nix’s coat properly on a hook, hung his own beside it. Nix had torn into the living room and, inexplicably, plugged in the Christmas tree. As Dick watched he went over to the bar and poured himself a drink as loudly as possible.

“Are you all right?” Dick asked.

“Oh, fine,” Nix said. “Just great.”

He brandished his glass and drank the whiskey like a shot, poured a second one. Dick watched him with what he was sure was ill-concealed concern, though Nix wasn’t looking at him, was looking everywhere but at Dick. When he’d moved on to the third drink Dick decided he ought to intervene, never mind the fact that it was getting on for one o’clock in the morning, that his head hurt, that while he had a pretty good idea of what had set Nix off he hadn’t a clue how to resolve it. He went over to Nix at the bar and put a hand on his arm. Nix froze, still refusing to look at Dick. Instead he locked his eyes on the illuminated tree.

“Why don’t you give it a rest?” Dick prised the glass from Nix’s fingers and set it on the bar. Nix didn’t typically respond well to being cut off, but now all the fight seemed to go out of him at once. He sighed and flagged like a deflated balloon.

“You could have told me you wanted to move out,” he said. “I’d have helped you find a place. Hell, I’ll move out, rent you this dump. Less than two years, right?”

Dick sighed. “I was only making conversation.”

Nix continued on as though Dick hadn’t spoken. “Unless you’d rather have Roger take you on a home tour. Make a whole day of it. He’s a queer, you know. In case you were wondering.”

He spat the word. Dick flinched, for all the revelation wasn’t especially surprising. But there was something in that particular acid tone Dick recognized, some hint of of self-deprecation he himself had blessedly grown out of. Nix had worked his way closer to Dick now. He was looking at him straight on, eyes shining, cheeks aflame. Dick had the strange thought that perhaps Nix wanted Dick to hit him. He remembered his old demon, who still sidled up out of the dark sometimes. Dick was better at keeping him quiet now, but he remembered how, in a particular mood, the demon had sometimes given him the notion to go out and get another man’s hands on him one way or another.

Dick wouldn’t hit Nix. Not with his fists, anyway. He swallowed. “Would you be jealous?” he asked.

Nix gasped. The sound seemed to issue not only from his mouth but from his whole body, and just as he drew that sharp huff of breath into his lungs he drew Dick toward him too until they were holding one another.

“Yes,” Nix said, voice hard.

He licked his lips, and even back in Europe there had never been a moment Dick wanted him as much as he did now. But he still had some instinct for self-preservation, and as Nix began to lean in Dick resisted, held him at arms-length. “Don’t,” he muttered, as though admonishing himself. “Not if you’re going to blame it on the drink.”

“I’m drunker now than I was then,” Nix said. “But that never had anything to do with it.”

Dick kissed him.

Tomorrow, he decided, he could sort through the particulars. But now there was only Nix, who allowed himself to be backed up against the wallpaper and kissed as thoroughly and decisively as Dick was capable of under the circumstances. Dick had shocked him; he could feel it in the way tension sang all through Nix’s body, as though the surprise was working through him from head to toe.

“God,” Nix groaned when they broke apart. “I’m an idiot. You—I can’t believe I was right.”

“Oh, Lewis.”

Dick smiled sadly, and kissed Nix on the temple. He felt as though he was flying, but he could still remember that dark autumn in Joigny, how some days he thought of sailing east instead of west, or of hopping a train headed anywhere but home. He would dream of passing into a country where no one knew him. He’d cross border after border and keep going. He would never see Nix again.

“You hesitated, or I thought you did. And it made me lose my nerve.”

“You ever think of asking?”

“It was easier to think you didn’t want it. I suppose that won’t make sense to you, but I’m a coward.”

“You’re not a coward, Lew.”

“I meant the rest of it. All that shit about serving together. And look, case in point. Here you are saving me from myself, yet again.”

Dick held him closer. It was wonderful to hold Nix in his arms and know that it wasn’t for the sake of warmth, or a too-small tent, or a frantic dive into a foxhole. Nix said Dick had saved him from himself, and now Dick thought of that phone call ringing through the dark of a Pennsylvania winter, of a brick house with all the lights on, of the Christmas tree, of everything he hadn’t known he wanted until Nix showed him.

“Well,” Dick said. “The feeling’s mutual.”


End file.
